Dear Colleague,

• We are delighted to welcome James Gustave Speth as a Senior Fellow with The Democracy Collaborative. Gus is a law professor at Vermont Law School, former Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, and founder of the World Resources Institute. As one of our nation’s leading environmental advocates and thought leaders, Gus brings a wealth of knowledge about economic and environmental sustainability to our work. In his position as Senior Fellow, Gus co-chairs our Next System Project with Gar Alperovitz. His most recent book is America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy.

• Last month, the Illinois Task Force on Social Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Enterprise released its final report to the Governor and General Assembly, incorporating a number of The Democracy Collaborative’s recommendations for low-cost, high-return policies to build community wealth. Key strategies include the creation of a statewide Employee Ownership Center, establishment of hospital community benefit set asides for social enterprise procurement, and changes to Illinois’ Cooperative Act to be more hospitable to worker-owned co-ops.

• In a recent Huffington Post article, Aaron Bartley, co-founder of People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH Buffalo), describes the growing use of anchor-based economic development strategies and recommends the Collaborative’s Anchor Dashboard as a tool for universities to measure their community impact. The current issue of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Forefront magazine also highlights the Dashboard as a way to improve conditions in rustbelt cities. At the same time, students with the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network have launched a yearlong project at universities such as Cornell, in which they use the Dashboard to evaluate Network institutions’ community impact.

• Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz appeared on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay of The Real News Network in a five-part series to discuss his decades-long work on political economy and the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the New York Times’ Room for Debate series, “Are Big Banks out of Control,” Gar argues that the continued threat of regulatory capture may require nationalizing the big banks. Gar also wrote a column for Al Jazeera in which he calls on Janet Yellen, the new Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, to redirect the Fed’s priorities to support democratization of the economy.

• On a new webpage, we have made all of The Democracy Collaborative’s infographics on community wealth building and related topics available. If you find them valuable (or even provocative!), please pass along to others in the growing movement for an inclusive and equitable economy.